Work In Progress: A Systematic Review Describing Impacts on Engineering Undergraduates Who Participate in Outreach

Joanna K. Garner; Karen A. Thole; Michael Alley

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Conference: 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access
Location: Virtual On line
Publication Date: June 22, 2020
Start Date: June 22, 2020
End Date: June 26, 2021
Conference Session: Novel Strategies for Studying Liberal Education
Tagged Division: Liberal Education/Engineering & Society
Tagged Topic: Diversity
Page Count: 26
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--35604
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/35604
Download Count: 514

Paper Authors

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Joanna K. Garner Old Dominion University

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Dr. Garner is Executive Director of The Center for Educational Partnerships at Old Dominion University, VA.

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Karen A. Thole Pennsylvania State University, University Park

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Karen A. Thole serves as the head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Pennsylvania State University and also holds the title of Distinguished Professor. She is the co-founder of the Engineering Ambassador Network, which is a professional development program for engineering students with an outreach mission to high school students. Her area of expertise is turbine cooling and using additive manufacturing to develop innovative cooling technologies. She has published over 220 archival papers and advised 70 dissertations and theses.
Dr. Thole has provided service leadership to numerous organizations including being a member of ASME’s Board of Governors. She has also served as the Chair of the Board of Directors for the ASME’s International Gas Turbine Institute in which she led a number of initiatives to promote communities of women engineers and students. In her roles as an educator, researcher, and mentor, Dr. Thole has received numerous awards. The most notable awards include, being recognized by the United States White House as a Champion of Change for STEM. She has been recognized by Penn State’s Rosemary Schraer Mentoring Award and Howard B. Palmer Faculty Mentoring Award. She was recognized in 2014 by the Society of Women Engineers’ Distinguished Engineering Educator Award and in 2016 by ASME’s Edwin F. Church Medal ASME’s George Westinghouse Medal. In 2017, she received ABET’s Claire L. Felbinger Award for her work in diversifying engineering. In 2019, she received AIAA’s Air Breathing Propulsion Award for her contributions to promoting diversity and for her technical work in gas turbine cooling.

Dr. Thole holds two degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.

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Michael Alley Pennsylvania State University, University Park

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Michael Alley is a professor of teaching for engineering communications at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Craft of Scientific Writing (Springer, 2018) and The Craft of Scientific Presentations (Springer-Verlag, 2013). He is also founder of the popular websites Writing as an Engineer or Scientist (www.craftofscientificwriting.com) and the Assertion-Evidence Approach (www.assertion-evidence.com).

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Abstract

To teach STEM content to K-12 students and to recruit talented and diverse K-12 students into STEM, many outreach programs at universities in the United States rely on STEM undergraduates. While the design of such outreach typically focuses on the K-12 students who are taught or recruited, an important but under-researched consideration is the effect of the outreach on the professional development of the STEM undergraduates themselves. This WIP describes a systematic review of literature on the topic of the impact(s) of involving undergraduates in engineering outreach, with a particular focus on studies that measure and report on the impact on the undergraduate students. Supporting this effort is the NSF EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) program.

The first steps were to develop inclusion and exclusion criteria for the review. Criteria for including the papers were fourfold: (1) describe programmatic outreach efforts from one or more colleges of engineering to K-12 audiences, (2) include undergraduate engineering students as ambassadors or mentors, (3) take place within the continental United States and (4) include evidence of impacts on the undergraduate students using qualitative or quantitative means. In other words, papers were excluded if they (1) described undergraduate involvement in service learning, affinity group, or community engagement projects, (2) included undergraduates simply as chaperones or creators of classroom activities, (3) described activities undertaken in overseas settings, and (4) did not report any impacts on undergraduate students conducting the outreach. Next, search terms were defined to cover our areas of interest. Three academic databases were searched using all three terms: engineering + undergraduate students + outreach. Records were retrieved for 1996-2018. The ASEE search revealed 3,403 records, and the ERIC and Education Research Complete searches revealed just 23 and 7 records, respectively.

Using the search terms in a historical manner revealed a significant upward trend in the number of papers describing projects and research studies that involved undergraduate students in an outreach capacity. For example, whereas a search of the 1996 ASEE PEER database yielded just 14 papers, this number had grown to 124 by 2006 and 303 by 2016. The large corpus of literature became much smaller once three of the four complementary inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied. Only 462 papers were eligible for an informational value assessment, which involves detailed reading and confirmation of the fourth inclusion/exclusion criterion. Once again, a historical trend was evident, with only 3 papers being retained from the 1996 PEER archive, 14 in 2006, and 82 in 2016. Work is currently underway to create a detailed matrix describing the informational value of the studies retrieved from each database. This work will include a study of the characteristics, measures, main findings, and contribution to the question of outreach and ambassadorship impact. In addition, key sentences are being extracted that will contribute to a qualitative thematic synthesis of the findings. The goal of the work is to present a synthesis of findings and gaps that can be addressed by future research in this area.

Citation
Format

Garner, J. K., & Thole, K. A., & Alley, M. (2020, June), Work In Progress: A Systematic Review Describing Impacts on Engineering Undergraduates Who Participate in Outreach Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--35604

TY - CPAPER
AB - To teach STEM content to K-12 students and to recruit talented and diverse K-12 students into STEM, many outreach programs at universities in the United States rely on STEM undergraduates. While the design of such outreach typically focuses on the K-12 students who are taught or recruited, an important but under-researched consideration is the effect of the outreach on the professional development of the STEM undergraduates themselves. This WIP describes a systematic review of literature on the topic of the impact(s) of involving undergraduates in engineering outreach, with a particular focus on studies that measure and report on the impact on the undergraduate students. Supporting this effort is the NSF EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) program.

The first steps were to develop inclusion and exclusion criteria for the review. Criteria for including the papers were fourfold: (1) describe programmatic outreach efforts from one or more colleges of engineering to K-12 audiences, (2) include undergraduate engineering students as ambassadors or mentors, (3) take place within the continental United States and (4) include evidence of impacts on the undergraduate students using qualitative or quantitative means. In other words, papers were excluded if they (1) described undergraduate involvement in service learning, affinity group, or community engagement projects, (2) included undergraduates simply as chaperones or creators of classroom activities, (3) described activities undertaken in overseas settings, and (4) did not report any impacts on undergraduate students conducting the outreach. Next, search terms were defined to cover our areas of interest. Three academic databases were searched using all three terms: engineering + undergraduate students + outreach. Records were retrieved for 1996-2018. The ASEE search revealed 3,403 records, and the ERIC and Education Research Complete searches revealed just 23 and 7 records, respectively.

Using the search terms in a historical manner revealed a significant upward trend in the number of papers describing projects and research studies that involved undergraduate students in an outreach capacity. For example, whereas a search of the 1996 ASEE PEER database yielded just 14 papers, this number had grown to 124 by 2006 and 303 by 2016. The large corpus of literature became much smaller once three of the four complementary inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied. Only 462 papers were eligible for an informational value assessment, which involves detailed reading and confirmation of the fourth inclusion/exclusion criterion. Once again, a historical trend was evident, with only 3 papers being retained from the 1996 PEER archive, 14 in 2006, and 82 in 2016. Work is currently underway to create a detailed matrix describing the informational value of the studies retrieved from each database. This work will include a study of the characteristics, measures, main findings, and contribution to the question of outreach and ambassadorship impact. In addition, key sentences are being extracted that will contribute to a qualitative thematic synthesis of the findings. The goal of the work is to present a synthesis of findings and gaps that can be addressed by future research in this area.

AU - Joanna K. Garner
AU - Karen A. Thole
AU - Michael Alley
CY - Virtual On line
DA - 2020/06/22
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Work In Progress: A Systematic Review Describing Impacts on Engineering Undergraduates Who Participate in Outreach
UR - https://peer.asee.org/35604
DO - 10.18260/1-2--35604
ER -